✦ Nassau, counted

Nassau by the numbers.

Every restaurant we track in Nassau County, NY, measured on the same scale as everywhere else — which is the only way a number from here means anything next to a number from anywhere else.

Median Sweet Scoreacross 3,704 scored places

The reason this site exists

Star averages can't tell anyone apart

71% of every place we track lands between 4.0 and 4.7 stars. The most common score of all is 4.4 — that badge is worn by 477 different restaurants. A number that everybody has is not information. The Sweet Score spreads the same places across 20 bands instead of one.

Star average — one spike, no separation

Sweet Score — the same places, actually spread out

How the Sweet Score is built →

Where a street has a specialty

The blocks that are actually known for something

Not folklore — arithmetic. For every neighbourhood we ask what share of its restaurants belong to a category, and compare that to the same category’s share of the whole region. Hicksville is 11.3× more Indian than the region average. These are the streets you go to on purpose.

Bars are the multiple against the regional average. Every town →

What people actually order

The 16 dishes reviewers name most

Pulled from what reviewers wrote, not from menus. If a dish shows up here it’s because people kept bringing it up unprompted — which is the only kind of recommendation worth anything.

All the dishes →

The question everybody asks

Does spending more get you a better meal?

A little, and then it stops. The median $ place scores 47; the median $$$$ place scores 63. Four dollar signs buys you 16 points — on a scale where the gap between #1 and #50 in a single town is bigger than that.

Price	Places	Median Sweet Score	Median ratings
$	1,450	47	174
$$	1,543	55	280
$$$	98	60	369
$$$$	40	63	492

The categories

What this region is made of

Every place belongs to every category it earned, so these add up to more than 4,095. The median column is the honest one — a category with a lot of places and a low median is a category where picking badly is easy.

Category	Places	Median score	Ratings behind it
Coffee	514	44	171,595
Deli	499	48	82,489
Dessert	431	41	112,620
Bakery	424	49	112,663
Pizza	360	50	138,323
Italian	325	56	158,544
American	274	51	141,389
Chinese	261	43	57,743
Bar & Grill	251	52	73,446
Fast Food	230	31	157,017
Mexican	226	46	112,354
Breakfast & Brunch	201	43	137,459
Japanese	195	56	84,924
Burgers	181	39	168,171
Latin	177	47	103,036
Asian	158	52	58,211
Seafood	136	52	129,786
Sushi	128	54	53,755

Every ranking →

Where the food is

The 15 densest places to eat

Restaurants per named town or neighbourhood. Manhattan neighbourhoods are small and stacked, which is exactly why they dominate this list.

Borough by borough

The seven counties, side by side

Same measurement everywhere. The 'pricey' column is the share of places charging $$$ or more — it's the closest thing to a cost-of-dinner map we have.

County	Places	Median score	$$$ or more	Median ratings
Nassau County, NY	4,095	50	4%	193

The list nobody else can build

Loved, and almost nobody knows

High Sweet Score, barely any ratings. These are the places where the people who have been are near-unanimous and the crowd hasn’t arrived. This is what a percentile can find and a star average can’t.

The other end

The most-rated restaurants in the region

Volume, not quality — though the two turn out to be less related than anyone expects. These are the places everybody has an opinion about.

What the board can do for you

Counted, so you can filter by it

Every one of these is a list. Outdoor seating in August, somewhere that takes a reservation, somewhere that will let the dog sit down too.

Every filter →